Page 60 of No Offense

Molly nodded. “Phyllis. Yes?”

“When I was a kid growing up here, I got into trouble a lot. Nothing serious, but I might have been headed down a wrong path if I hadn’t ended up in your library one day and run into your boss—Mrs. Robinette. It was raining, so it wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go, and she handed me a book she said I might like.”

Molly continued to smile, thinking of Elijah. “What book was it?”

“An autobiography written by a man named Dick Gregory.”

Molly’s smile broadened. She’d have to remember to tell Phyllis later. She’d be so pleased. “Good choice, was it?”

“I loved that book. I had no idea there could be books like that. I don’t think I’d ever read a whole book before, except when required to for school. But that book—I finished it in a day. And then all I wanted to do after that was find more books like it. I even tried out for the school track team a week later because that’s the sport Dick Gregory played.”

Molly frowned. “But I thought you played baseball in high school?”

“I did. The baseball coach saw me running track and recruited me for the team. I guess I was pretty good, because our team made it to nationals.”

She smiled and took his empty plate from him and set it, along with hers, on the coffee table. “I love hearing stories like that. All it takes to get someone to love reading is finding them the right book—a book that could even change their life.”

“Is that why you’re a children’s librarian?” he asked her. “Did you have a book like that?”

“Of course. Only I’m sorry to say it was Nancy Drew—but an original copy, not any of those bland reprints. I found it in my great-grandmother’s attic, all crumbling and falling apart, and it was like finding a secret treasure. Original Nancy drove a yellow roadster and wore a cloche and went after real gangsters with guns. I have it here if you want to—”

She’d started to get up to go to her stack of mystery juvenilia, but he reached out and grabbed her hand, then gently pulled her back down onto the couch. When she turned her head to look at him questioningly, she saw that his blue-eyed gaze seemed more intense than ever.

“How did you know I played baseball in high school?” he asked.

Her heart stuttered.Oops. “It’s a small town. People talk.”

“Do they? Or have you been asking around about me?” His lips were tantalizingly close to hers.

“No.” She absolutely had been. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you like me.”

“Well, I don’t dislike you. I certainly respect you in a professional capacity.”

“I respect you in a more-than-professional capacity.”

The next thing she knew, he was kissing her, his lips tasting sweetly tart, like the pie. Not just kissing her, either, but embarking on a thorough exploration of the inside of her mouth with his tongue while his hands slipped up beneath her nightshirt. Fortunately, she wasn’t wearing a bra.

She had no idea what she’d said to cause this kind of reaction from him—something about respecting him, and Nancy Drew.

But if mentioning Nancy Drew was all it took to get him to respond this way, she was going to talk about that crime-solving minx all of the time. As his lips dipped below her mouth and slid down her throat, those hard hands of his began doing things to her beneath the nightshirt that made her toes curl. Then he was pulling the too-large shirt upand over her head, exposing her breasts to his roving lips. When his hot mouth closed over one of her nipples, teasing it with his tongue, Molly couldn’t help burying both her hands in his thick dark hair and arching her body against his, even as she tilted her own head back in ecstasy and... heard a stack of books fall over behind her. Damn! The sound of the cascading hardcovers caused him to look up in surprise, but she only pushed his head back where it belonged and said, “Don’t worry about that.” She’d sort the books out tomorrow.

The only problem was that his erection wasn’t the only hard thing she could feel against her soft, bare curves.

“Um, excuse me.” She plucked at his shirt as one of the points of his sheriff’s badge dug into her. “Would you mind?”

“Sorry,” he rasped, and fumbled at the buttons of his uniform.

“Let me help,” she said, and soon he was gloriously shirtless above her. It was everything she’d been hoping for and more. And yet it was not nearly enough.

“And this.” She pointed impatiently at his belt, on which he still wore his gun.

“Oh, damn.” He drew off the belt to place it high on her stack of gothic romances, which promptly tumbled to the floor. His look of dismay was comical. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Molly said, and sat up to work on undoing his fly, realizing they were never going to get to where she wanted them to be as quickly as she needed to get there if she did not take the initiative.

“No, I can—”